Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication apparatus and a control method thereof, and particularly relates to the control of communication with another device.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a system in which a digital camera and a smartphone are connected with each other using wireless LAN to enable exchange of images therebetween has been known. Generally, a user is required to select or input some communication parameters such as an SSID and a password for connection using wireless LAN, and thus the procedure to establish the connection is complicated.
In order to solve the complexity of the connection procedure, various methods have been devised. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2013-162322 discloses a technique in which, once a connection is established, parameters used in the connection are stored as a connection history so as to simplify the connection procedure thereafter.
Further, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2014-82587 discloses a technique to share parameters used in a connection, using a near field communication function such as NFC (Near Field Communication). According to this disclosure, the time and trouble of the user for establishing the first wireless LAN connection can be saved, which cannot be solved by Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2013-162322. Instead, there is a constraint that the devices need to be brought close to each other for the connection. Then, it is conceivable that connections can be established more efficiently by combining this with Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2013-162322 mentioned above, so that the work is saved by the near field wireless communication function at the first time, and is further saved using the connection history from the next time.
However, if the aforementioned conventional techniques are simply combined, there are disadvantages as described below. That is, wireless connection information stored when a wireless connection is established by a wireless connection setting operation may be possibly overwritten, with information on the wireless connection using near field wireless communication, by performing near field wireless communication that allows a wireless connection to be established only by bringing the devices close to each other. In particular, since the connection can be established conveniently by a simple way of just bringing them close to each other, the possibility of overwriting the connection history is considered to be high. In this case, the user is required to perform the wireless connection setting operation again for connection with the device that corresponds to the wireless connection information stored when the wireless connection has been established by the wireless connection setting operation.